I think you're confusing "memory cycle" with "instruction cycle". By "memory cycle", I mean a single bus access to memory: the memory address gets put on the bus, and then the data value is received or sent. Most Z80 and 6502 instructions require several such accesses: 1 to fetch the opcode byte, possibly additional ones to fetch further operation bytes, if any, followed by memory accesses for operand fetch and/or writing the result.
one reason I think the 8080/Z80-series beat the 6502 was an early version of the megahertz myth. The 4mhz base clock rate of the z80 was faster than the 6502's base clock rate of 1Mhz. But the z80 used 4 clock cycles and a few wait states for most instructions. the 6502 complete nearly every instruction in one instruction.
I'm not sure why you think the 8080/Z80 "beat" the 6502. While it's true that many early 8-bit microcomputers were based on the 8080 and Z80, especially in the CP/M world, some very popular and successful 8-bit systems used the 6502, like the Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari's home computers and game consoles.
As for the clock speeds, they are indeed misleading, partly because they measure different things. 8080 and Z80 systems used "fine-grained" clocks, with 2 to 3 clock cycles per memory cycle. The 6502, and its predecessor the Motorola 6800, used "coarse-grained" clocks, with a single clock cycle per memory cycle. As long as the two types of systems used similar memory technology, the memory cycle times would be similar, and performance of these systems was almost totally dominated by memory traffic.
these days most people represent binary numbers as hex. Ever wonder why Octal used to be so much more popular? when you write octal numbers they are really inconvenient so why use them?
Well the answer is, if you are keying in binary number in one switch at a time you can do it lightning fast in octal but not in hex.
with octal you use your middle, index and ring fingers and you can whip the switches up an down. While you do have four fingers you can't easily use all four fingers to slap the switches
Interesting, but I don't think that's the only reason octal used to be more popular than hex.
Although hexadecimal was introduced very early in computer history, it was generally rejected early on. There was little agreement on how to represent digits greater than 9, and it seems many people found the idea of using letters for numerical digits to be highly objectionable.
Octal didn't have that problem, and it was a natural fit for computers of the 1950s and early 1960s. Many of these used 6-bit characters (upper case only) and had word sizes which were multiples of 6. For example, all of DEC's systems developed before the PDP-11 had such word sizes, as did IBM's 700 and 7000 series of scientific systems. On such systems, words and characters would cleanly fit into an even number of octal digits.
Even on the PDP-11, which had 16-bit words and 8-bit characters, octal was still preferred. The PDP-11's binary instruction format, which had 3-bit specifiers for its registers and addressing modes, made it much simpler to read and write PDP-11 machine code in octal than in hex.
IBM's System/360, which had 8-bit characters, 32-bit words, and byte-addressable memory, had a big effect in making hexadecimal popular in the computing world, but it took time for the shift to fully take place. I think part of the reason octal was still used with the Altair was persistence of octal's old dominance.
It is interesting that both birds and animals appear to lack this trait, though. We both descend from much the same sort of lizards but in different directions. Finding out exactly where this gene sequence appeared might be productive.
Well, birds and mammals are both descended from ancient reptiles, but the split happened a long way back. While the primitive reptiles which gave rise to both branches might be called "lizards" by ordinary people, who naturally refer to most generic four-legged reptiles as "lizards", there's actually a big gulf between these animals and real lizards, which are closer to the birds' branch of the family tree.
The most obvious split between the two branches of the family tree was in the skull structure, specifically the number of openings in the skull for muscle attachment. The mammals' branch of the tree are known as "synapsids"; their ancestors had a single pair of these openings. Among the synapsids were the entire huge tribe of "mammal-like reptiles" (therapsids), as well as the mammals themselves, who are the last survivors of the group. Dimetrodon is probably the most familiar prehistoric non-mammalian synapsid.
The birds come from the other big branch of the tree, the "diapsids", which descended from reptiles with two pairs of skull muscle openings. This group was much more successful overall than the synapsids. Among the diapsids are the lizards and snakes and the "archosaurs", which produced the crocodilians, pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and birds (via dinosaurs).
While the basic theme of your story is correct, you're confused on a number of details.
Other posters have already pointed out that the remark attributed to Watson appears to be a misquote, though the section of Wikipedia's article on Watson discussing the quote does mention the initial sales results (18 machines vs. a prediction of 5) which you refer to. However, you seem to have confused IBM's 600 series of electromechanical punched-card calculators with its 700 series of large-scale electronic computers. The machine in question was not the IBM 600 (an electromechanical multiplier introduced in 1931) but the IBM 701, the first IBM electronic computer produced in quantity. This was a very large, expensive machine designed for scientific and technical calculations; its market was similar to that of the supercomputers of later decades.
The IBM 650 was not a bigger, faster version of the 701; that was the IBM 704. The 650 was a much smaller, cheaper machine designed for customers who could not afford a large-scale computer system. In that sense it was the predecessor to other later small-scale computer systems like the IBM 1620 and the DEC PDP-8. The 650 was sold as a replacement for IBM's earlier 600 series of punched-card calculating machines.
I don't know where your estimated and actual sales numbers for the 650 came from, but they appear to be incorrect as well. However, the machine was indeed far more successful than IBM's original sales predictions for it, with over 2000 being produced. But since it was a relatively low-cost system, I suspect that IBM's "mountain of money" available for the System/360's development was mainly brought in by other products, such as their 700 and 7000 series computers.
No, I wasn't around in the 1950s. I'm just a computer history nut.:)
And of course, you shouldn't count out yourself. You're an Indo-European living in America. It seems hypocritical in the extreme to tell others to leave conquered lands. Your province of origin is northwestern Iran, every other place on this earth indoeuropeans live (including Europe), is obviously conquered from someone else.
While your basic point is valid, this statement is bogus. Most speakers of Indo-European languages are not descended from the speakers of Proto-Indo-European. Languages spread not by biological descent but by people learning to speak them. Yes, the ancestor languages of the Indo-European family were spread partly by conquest, but that usually meant a small group of elite warriors taking over a larger population and bringing their language with them, in the same way that William the Conqueror's Norman knights brought their vocabulary to England. Most of the conquered people simply adopted the new languages.
But yes, most humans are living on land conquered from other humans. And once you consider non-human inhabitants, every human becomes a descendant of interlopers. For that matter, all the non-human inhabitants are themselves usurpers from earlier ones. There's just no getting away from that.
When I still used SBC (which as far as I know is owned by AT&T)...
Actually, the current AT&T is the former SBC. SBC bought out AT&T Corp. in 2005 and changed their own name to AT&T Inc. to take advantage of the AT&T brand.
I have no clue why he chose ALGOL, except possibly for historical coolness, but he probably selected ALGOL 60 rather than ALGOL 68 because the latter was far more complex and was widely criticized for this, even by some of its own designers.
Also before someone jumps on the "Trains are more efficent" bandwagon:
- The national average for cars is approximately 25 miles per gallon
- The national average for passenger trains is the same energy equivalence (25 people-miles per gallon).
- So if you simply upgrade your car to a hybrid (40-70mpg), then you are more-efficient than a passenger train. Or if you carpool and carry a passenger, your car's efficiency jumps to 50 people-miles per gallon.... again more efficient than a passenger train.
Without knowing the source of these estimates, this is hardly convincing. And while it's no great surprise that underutilized Amtrak trains with poor service and scheduling might be less efficient than cars, that's not the choice we're making here.
What's the per seat-mile efficiency for a car running from San Francisco to L.A., versus that on a high-speed train running the same route? And what about the advantage of shorter travel time?
Of course, a fully-occupied train should be more efficient per seat mile than a fully-occupied car running the same route at the same speed, assuming the train doesn't have excessively heavy passenger coaches. It's simply a matter of physics; the losses per person due to air drag and rolling resistance are smaller, and the power plant, being larger, will be more efficient, since it can run at higher temperatures (greater thermal efficiency) and will have lower frictional losses per unit of power produced (greater mechanical efficiency). (If the train is electric, there will be transmission losses, but the net efficiency should be even higher, since otherwise diesel-electric locomotives would be used instead.) I suppose the increased drag of a high-speed train might offset some of the efficiency gains, but I'm not sure by how much, and you get shorter travel time in return.
The big question is what the utilization of the high-speed train would be.
One could compare to air travel, but I would expect the high-speed train to come out ahead. The L.A.-San Francisco corridor is not exactly optimal for jet airliner efficiency; the plane can barely get to cruising altitude before it has to descend again.
So this bullet train that covers 800 miles will carry how many of California's population each year? 0.1%? Yeah that's a wise investment of non-existent american dollars.
Well, if we really don't have the money, then we can't afford to do anything, including building the extra highway you propose.
Wouldn't it make more sense to lay-down an I-3 to run semi-parallel to I-5, and thereby carry any excess traffic between these two cities? It would be far cheaper, far more flexible in design (cars aren't tied to rails), use existing equipment (cars and macadam and road signs and lighting), and could even be made environmentally-friendly by designating the new I-3 "for hybrids or electrics only".
That might reduce some of the load on I-5, true. But let's think this through a bit more. First, it's not obvious to me that a new interstate highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles would be vastly cheaper than the high-speed rail line. You have to buy land, do environmental studies, overcome political objections, lay roadbed, build all the connector ramps and other infrastructure, etc. And to make the system effective, you have to deal with the two big bottlenecks on the route: Tejon Pass in the south, where I-5 enters the L.A. basin, and Pacheco Pass in the north, where California highway 152 runs over the mountains between US-101 and I-5. It's a lot harder to build a highway through a restricted mountain pass than through open flatland. The 152 around Pacheco Pass is especially bad; a good portion of its length is a two-lane undivided highway running through farm communities with driveways that open directly on the highway. The speed limit is 55 mph, and in this case it's fully justified. And while there has been some political opposition to the proposed rail route through there, it would be nothing compared to what a major highway expansion would face.
Even if you dealt with those, you'd still run into congestion once you entered the L.A. basin, because the entire freeway system there has become horribly overloaded.
And when you're done with all this, what do you have? Another route which will still carry a 70 mph speed limit and which requires you to focus on driving all the way. Even if you ignore the legal limit and aren't delayed by trucks, you're not likely to go above 85 mph at best. It will likely take just as long to drive between the two cities as it does now: 6 to 8 hours. That hardly seems worth the trouble to me. (I drive the route a few times a year.)
It seems much more attractive to have a system which promises to cut that travel time to one half or even one third, and which would allow you to relax during the journey, while still avoiding the hassles of modern air travel. True, you would give up your car while you were away, but that seems a relatively small inconvenience, especially for brief stays. And you can always rent a car.
Our ancestors had a network of rails all over the U.S. which acted as the backbone of the nation during the 1800s and early 1900s. Then in the 1930 and 40s they abandoned them.
When you look at history, it helps to get it right. The big decline for passenger rail in the U.S. was after World War II. Yes, there was falloff before then, due to competition from cars, but there was no real alternative to rail for long-distance travel for most people. And during the war U.S. passenger rail traffic boomed, thanks to gasoline rationing and the needs of troop transport. It was only after the war, thanks to the growth of the interstate highway system and increasingly affordable air travel, that U.S. passenger rail entered its catastrophic decline.
Why? If rails had been superior then the railroad companies, being the dominant industry of that time, would have killed the car in its infancy. They failed because even though the rail companies were rich and could have squashed the carmakers, they were horribly inconvenient to use. So they died-out, similar to how newspapers are dying out today.
Yes, U.S. passenger rail transport eventually became less convenient than travel by car or by air, but the situation is nowhere near as simple as you lay out. By the time auto and air travel had become a big threat to the railroads, they were supported by giant industries themselves. And those industries were being aided by major government programs at the same time as the railroads were becoming increasingly hampered by government regulation.
By the way, you shouldn't use the standards of today's dysfunctional Amtrak to judge the convenience of U.S. passenger rail in its heyday, when it was fast, timely, and frequent.
Hell, you invented rail transport, period, not just the passenger railway. It's sad for me to hear the troubles inflicting present-day British passenger rail.
And people (both in the U.S. and abroad) tend to forget just how impressive the U.S. rail system was (and still is, when it comes to heavy freight). By the early twentieth century the U.S. had the most powerful locomotives, heaviest rolling stock, and strongest rail in the world, and it needed all that to handle the enormous volumes of traffic carried by American lines. We also had more miles of track than anyone else. Our rail system played a big part in making this country an industrial colossus.
Where's your source for this claim that it's been kicked off the Peninsula? Yeah, there's been flack from some communities about elevated tracks, but kicking it off the Peninsula would make the project practically useless, since that would destroy any travel benefits to all those people (like me) who live between San Francisco and San Jose.
Besides that, I figure they'll have to elevate or bury the lines eventually anyway, because too many trains are being delayed by people who use them as a suicide mechanism.
125 mph sounds exaggerated, since regular running above that speed with steam traction would have challenged or broken Mallard's record. But the basic point is valid--the fastest U.S. passenger trains in their heyday were much faster than they are today. The railroads were highly competitive, and passenger and mail service was important to them, so they did all they could to move it fast. It was the growth of air and highway transport which made those services no longer economical. Today's Amtrak trains are slow because they are usually the lowest priority traffic; the way the system works now, they mostly run on tracks owned by freight railroads and are nothing but an inconvenience to them.
However, rail travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles has never been especially fast. The main line runs through the Coast Ranges, a twisty route with lots of grades, so the sort of speeds possible in the flat Midwest were out of the question here.
...thanks to one abbreviation too many. It talks about "A. ramidus" (Ardipithecus ramidus) and then immediately jumps to mentioning "A. afarensis". If you didn't already know what "A. afarensis" was, you might assume that it's another species within genus Ardipithecus, but that second "A." stands for a separate genus, Australopithecus.
Okay, suppose we are back in the forties. We have lots of sound and telephone technology. There are tape and wire recorders. We have some early TV technology. There are mechanical calculators and cash registers. You have Hollerith punched cards, Jacquard looms, and the Harringay Tote. How would you set about it? Telephone technology and mercury delay lines were used for early memory, but you had to wait for your bit to arrive back. TV read/write tubes were used to store a small 2D array of dots and re-sample them, but they weren't really RAM yet.
To me it sounds like you're asking "could you make a computer starting with 1940s technology?", but that's pretty much what actually happened, since the first computers were developed during the 1940s. So just look into how the early computers were built.
For fundamental logic technology, I think the two main approaches were electromechanical relays, used by Howard Aiken at Harvard and Konrad Zuse in Germany, and vacuum tube triodes (or thermionic valves as the British called them), used by Eckert and Mauchly with ENIAC. Vacuum tubes won out for about the next decade, until transistors had matured enough to replace them.
For memory, different techniques were used. Machine registers were usually built using flip-flops made from the same technology as the other logic circuits. Programming was often done by plugboard wiring or by punched cards on the earliest machines, which didn't use the stored-program concept. (This approach is sometimes called a "Harvard architecture" and was named for Aiken's machines at Harvard.) Later machines did use denser memory technologies like the ones you mentioned: delay lines, cathode ray tubes, or spinning magnetic drums. These weren't randomly addressable and did have long access times, but that was just something designers had to work with. Even though cathode ray tube memories weren't randomly addressable, they did share some traits with modern DRAMs, like destructive read-out and the need for constant refreshing.
Secondary storage was on punched cards or magnetic tape; magnetic disks were still in the future.
For me, the big missed opportunity was the neon lamp. A neon lamp may take 20 volts to strike, but will run on 5 volts. A neon lamp would store a bit. You could even address a single bulb in a 2D array of them by X and Y buses, and query the state non-destructively, or change its state without affecting the others. Rather than having hundreds of little glass tubes, you might seal a 2D array into a single, flat tube. You would then have an early plasma display (remember the early orange ones in the eighties could store data?). There were calculating valves like the decatron (I remember using those) but, tantalizingly, no large-scale plasma arc logic.
It seems that some systems did use neons for some logic and memory (see
here, here, and here), but they're kind of tricky and are slow to switch, which may be why they weren't used more widely.
Most of the collection is pieces of computers because that's what people and companies donate, often discards and salvage.
Like that 360/91 console that features in the photographs? There is only the console panel; you go around back of it, and see thick bundles of yellow wires that were hacked off with a bolt-cutter when the machine was scrapped. Those lights will never blink again. So, should it be thrown out, or is there some value in preserving and displaying the hacked-off panel?
Indeed, for the Cray and Control Data supercomputers they have, there's no way you could hope to get a working machine. Those systems belonged to national defense labs, and when they were discarded, federal law required them to be disabled thoroughly enough to make it impractical to get them working again. Of course, I imagine that a group of dedicated people with enough time and resources could resurrect one, but it would be a huge task. Not to mention that the running and maintenance costs would be very high, worse than when the system was new. The Computer History Museum doesn't have the resources for that, and their focus is on preservation and documentation, not on reviving dead machines.
To me it seems more practical to revive these systems through accurate simulation on modern hardware.
> It's almost the last computer museum, too. The ones in Boston, San Diego, and Germany went bust.
Also, earlier this year I was in the Boston Museum of Science and they had quite a bit of old computer tech there (including a HUGE HDD platter like on the pics in TFA).
He's thinking of the old Computer Museum in Boston. Actually, the Computer History Museum was created by people who were dissatisfied with the Computer Museum, after its focus had shifted from computer history to public education about computers. But since there's less of a compelling reason for that latter role to be filled by a museum, it's no surprise to me that the Boston museum went under.
For the time in years he's really free! While you sit at home [... doing blah blah blah...], he's going to go out, get drunk, and finally get some real pussy.
I rather doubt his wife would be too happy with that.
As a couple of other people have pointed out, these are cyanobacteria, not "algae". Except for being microscopic and having photosynthesis, cyanobacteria are a long way from algae, although they used to be called "blue-green algae" before biologists figured out what they really were. They're actually a type of bacteria and are a very ancient group, possibly as old as 3 billion years or more. They are single-celled prokaryotes with a very simple cell structure which has no nucleus and lacks significant organelles. Algae, on the other hand, are eukaryotes, which evolved much later; they have a much more complex cell with both a nucleus and organelles. Among these organelles are chloroplasts, which do the actual photosynthesis in algae cells, and in fact these chloroplasts may be descended from cyanobacteria which became internal symbionts within eukaryotic cells.
Where I live, sometimes the clouds from the mountain waves are visible in long rows at over 25,000 feet elevation, in lines for a hundred miles downwind of the mountains themselves, and every one of those is strong enough to shake a plane like a ragdoll. A B-52 bomber had its vertical tail ripped off and lost part of a wing in clear air turbulence 5000 feet above the nearest mountain.
As another example of the danger of clear air turbulence from mountain waves, on March 5, 1966, BOAC Flight 911, a Boeing 707 on a flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong, broke up as it was flying near Mt. Fuji in clear weather, possibly in order to give the passengers a good view of the mountain.
The parent's story appears to be the second of the two incidents mentioned in the Christian Science Monitor article linked to in the summary. From the CSMonitor article:
There's less detail about the second incident. The safety board said it "became aware of another possibly similar incident" that occurred on a June 23 Northwest A330 flight between Hong Kong and Tokyo.
From the parent post:
>> This from a friend and NWA pilot I flew the B-757 >> with out of our Tokyo base.........Now obviously on the A-330 >> >> Well, I'm sure you have all heard of the Air France accident. I fly >> the same plane, the A330. >> >> Yesterday while coming up from Hong Kong to Tokyo , a 1700nm >> 4hr. flight, we experienced the same problems Air France had while >> flying thru bad weather. >> I have a link to the failures that occurred on AF 447. My list is >> almost the same. >> http://www.eurocockpit.com/images/acars447.php
[...]
>> Synopsis; >> Tuesday 23, 2009 10am enroute HKG to NRT. Entering Nara Japan >> airspace.
Actually, you're both around 80 years too late, thanks to the "iron lung". In fact, one iron lung inventor did sue another for patent infringement during the 1930s. However, he ended up with his own patents being invalidated, since it turned out all the claims in those patents had already been covered by earlier patents from others.
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No, it means 2 to 3. :)
I think you're confusing "memory cycle" with "instruction cycle". By "memory cycle", I mean a single bus access to memory: the memory address gets put on the bus, and then the data value is received or sent. Most Z80 and 6502 instructions require several such accesses: 1 to fetch the opcode byte, possibly additional ones to fetch further operation bytes, if any, followed by memory accesses for operand fetch and/or writing the result.
I'm not sure why you think the 8080/Z80 "beat" the 6502. While it's true that many early 8-bit microcomputers were based on the 8080 and Z80, especially in the CP/M world, some very popular and successful 8-bit systems used the 6502, like the Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari's home computers and game consoles.
As for the clock speeds, they are indeed misleading, partly because they measure different things. 8080 and Z80 systems used "fine-grained" clocks, with 2 to 3 clock cycles per memory cycle. The 6502, and its predecessor the Motorola 6800, used "coarse-grained" clocks, with a single clock cycle per memory cycle. As long as the two types of systems used similar memory technology, the memory cycle times would be similar, and performance of these systems was almost totally dominated by memory traffic.
Interesting, but I don't think that's the only reason octal used to be more popular than hex.
Although hexadecimal was introduced very early in computer history, it was generally rejected early on. There was little agreement on how to represent digits greater than 9, and it seems many people found the idea of using letters for numerical digits to be highly objectionable.
Octal didn't have that problem, and it was a natural fit for computers of the 1950s and early 1960s. Many of these used 6-bit characters (upper case only) and had word sizes which were multiples of 6. For example, all of DEC's systems developed before the PDP-11 had such word sizes, as did IBM's 700 and 7000 series of scientific systems. On such systems, words and characters would cleanly fit into an even number of octal digits.
Even on the PDP-11, which had 16-bit words and 8-bit characters, octal was still preferred. The PDP-11's binary instruction format, which had 3-bit specifiers for its registers and addressing modes, made it much simpler to read and write PDP-11 machine code in octal than in hex.
IBM's System/360, which had 8-bit characters, 32-bit words, and byte-addressable memory, had a big effect in making hexadecimal popular in the computing world, but it took time for the shift to fully take place. I think part of the reason octal was still used with the Altair was persistence of octal's old dominance.
Well, birds and mammals are both descended from ancient reptiles, but the split happened a long way back. While the primitive reptiles which gave rise to both branches might be called "lizards" by ordinary people, who naturally refer to most generic four-legged reptiles as "lizards", there's actually a big gulf between these animals and real lizards, which are closer to the birds' branch of the family tree.
The most obvious split between the two branches of the family tree was in the skull structure, specifically the number of openings in the skull for muscle attachment. The mammals' branch of the tree are known as "synapsids"; their ancestors had a single pair of these openings. Among the synapsids were the entire huge tribe of "mammal-like reptiles" (therapsids), as well as the mammals themselves, who are the last survivors of the group. Dimetrodon is probably the most familiar prehistoric non-mammalian synapsid.
The birds come from the other big branch of the tree, the "diapsids", which descended from reptiles with two pairs of skull muscle openings. This group was much more successful overall than the synapsids. Among the diapsids are the lizards and snakes and the "archosaurs", which produced the crocodilians, pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and birds (via dinosaurs).
While the basic theme of your story is correct, you're confused on a number of details.
:)
Other posters have already pointed out that the remark attributed to Watson appears to be a misquote, though the section of Wikipedia's article on Watson discussing the quote does mention the initial sales results (18 machines vs. a prediction of 5) which you refer to. However, you seem to have confused IBM's 600 series of electromechanical punched-card calculators with its 700 series of large-scale electronic computers. The machine in question was not the IBM 600 (an electromechanical multiplier introduced in 1931) but the IBM 701, the first IBM electronic computer produced in quantity. This was a very large, expensive machine designed for scientific and technical calculations; its market was similar to that of the supercomputers of later decades.
The IBM 650 was not a bigger, faster version of the 701; that was the IBM 704. The 650 was a much smaller, cheaper machine designed for customers who could not afford a large-scale computer system. In that sense it was the predecessor to other later small-scale computer systems like the IBM 1620 and the DEC PDP-8. The 650 was sold as a replacement for IBM's earlier 600 series of punched-card calculating machines.
I don't know where your estimated and actual sales numbers for the 650 came from, but they appear to be incorrect as well. However, the machine was indeed far more successful than IBM's original sales predictions for it, with over 2000 being produced. But since it was a relatively low-cost system, I suspect that IBM's "mountain of money" available for the System/360's development was mainly brought in by other products, such as their 700 and 7000 series computers.
No, I wasn't around in the 1950s. I'm just a computer history nut.
Ovid (English Poet, 43 BC - 17 AD))
Ovid was a Latin poet, not an English one. At that time the languages which would evolve into English were being spoken by Germanic barbarian tribes.
> When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and
Should be discreet. (Sorry, personal pet peeve. :)
And of course, you shouldn't count out yourself. You're an Indo-European living in America. It seems hypocritical in the extreme to tell others to leave conquered lands. Your province of origin is northwestern Iran, every other place on this earth indoeuropeans live (including Europe), is obviously conquered from someone else.
While your basic point is valid, this statement is bogus. Most speakers of Indo-European languages are not descended from the speakers of Proto-Indo-European. Languages spread not by biological descent but by people learning to speak them. Yes, the ancestor languages of the Indo-European family were spread partly by conquest, but that usually meant a small group of elite warriors taking over a larger population and bringing their language with them, in the same way that William the Conqueror's Norman knights brought their vocabulary to England. Most of the conquered people simply adopted the new languages.
But yes, most humans are living on land conquered from other humans. And once you consider non-human inhabitants, every human becomes a descendant of interlopers. For that matter, all the non-human inhabitants are themselves usurpers from earlier ones. There's just no getting away from that.
When I still used SBC (which as far as I know is owned by AT&T) ...
Actually, the current AT&T is the former SBC. SBC bought out AT&T Corp. in 2005 and changed their own name to AT&T Inc. to take advantage of the AT&T brand.
I have no clue why he chose ALGOL, except possibly for historical coolness, but he probably selected ALGOL 60 rather than ALGOL 68 because the latter was far more complex and was widely criticized for this, even by some of its own designers.
Without knowing the source of these estimates, this is hardly convincing. And while it's no great surprise that underutilized Amtrak trains with poor service and scheduling might be less efficient than cars, that's not the choice we're making here.
What's the per seat-mile efficiency for a car running from San Francisco to L.A., versus that on a high-speed train running the same route? And what about the advantage of shorter travel time?
Of course, a fully-occupied train should be more efficient per seat mile than a fully-occupied car running the same route at the same speed, assuming the train doesn't have excessively heavy passenger coaches. It's simply a matter of physics; the losses per person due to air drag and rolling resistance are smaller, and the power plant, being larger, will be more efficient, since it can run at higher temperatures (greater thermal efficiency) and will have lower frictional losses per unit of power produced (greater mechanical efficiency). (If the train is electric, there will be transmission losses, but the net efficiency should be even higher, since otherwise diesel-electric locomotives would be used instead.) I suppose the increased drag of a high-speed train might offset some of the efficiency gains, but I'm not sure by how much, and you get shorter travel time in return.
The big question is what the utilization of the high-speed train would be.
One could compare to air travel, but I would expect the high-speed train to come out ahead. The L.A.-San Francisco corridor is not exactly optimal for jet airliner efficiency; the plane can barely get to cruising altitude before it has to descend again.
Well, if we really don't have the money, then we can't afford to do anything, including building the extra highway you propose.
That might reduce some of the load on I-5, true. But let's think this through a bit more. First, it's not obvious to me that a new interstate highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles would be vastly cheaper than the high-speed rail line. You have to buy land, do environmental studies, overcome political objections, lay roadbed, build all the connector ramps and other infrastructure, etc. And to make the system effective, you have to deal with the two big bottlenecks on the route: Tejon Pass in the south, where I-5 enters the L.A. basin, and Pacheco Pass in the north, where California highway 152 runs over the mountains between US-101 and I-5. It's a lot harder to build a highway through a restricted mountain pass than through open flatland. The 152 around Pacheco Pass is especially bad; a good portion of its length is a two-lane undivided highway running through farm communities with driveways that open directly on the highway. The speed limit is 55 mph, and in this case it's fully justified. And while there has been some political opposition to the proposed rail route through there, it would be nothing compared to what a major highway expansion would face.
Even if you dealt with those, you'd still run into congestion once you entered the L.A. basin, because the entire freeway system there has become horribly overloaded.
And when you're done with all this, what do you have? Another route which will still carry a 70 mph speed limit and which requires you to focus on driving all the way. Even if you ignore the legal limit and aren't delayed by trucks, you're not likely to go above 85 mph at best. It will likely take just as long to drive between the two cities as it does now: 6 to 8 hours. That hardly seems worth the trouble to me. (I drive the route a few times a year.)
It seems much more attractive to have a system which promises to cut that travel time to one half or even one third, and which would allow you to relax during the journey, while still avoiding the hassles of modern air travel. True, you would give up your car while you were away, but that seems a relatively small inconvenience, especially for brief stays. And you can always rent a car.
When you look at history, it helps to get it right. The big decline for passenger rail in the U.S. was after World War II. Yes, there was falloff before then, due to competition from cars, but there was no real alternative to rail for long-distance travel for most people. And during the war U.S. passenger rail traffic boomed, thanks to gasoline rationing and the needs of troop transport. It was only after the war, thanks to the growth of the interstate highway system and increasingly affordable air travel, that U.S. passenger rail entered its catastrophic decline.
Yes, U.S. passenger rail transport eventually became less convenient than travel by car or by air, but the situation is nowhere near as simple as you lay out. By the time auto and air travel had become a big threat to the railroads, they were supported by giant industries themselves. And those industries were being aided by major government programs at the same time as the railroads were becoming increasingly hampered by government regulation.
By the way, you shouldn't use the standards of today's dysfunctional Amtrak to judge the convenience of U.S. passenger rail in its heyday, when it was fast, timely, and frequent.
Hell, you invented rail transport, period, not just the passenger railway. It's sad for me to hear the troubles inflicting present-day British passenger rail.
And people (both in the U.S. and abroad) tend to forget just how impressive the U.S. rail system was (and still is, when it comes to heavy freight). By the early twentieth century the U.S. had the most powerful locomotives, heaviest rolling stock, and strongest rail in the world, and it needed all that to handle the enormous volumes of traffic carried by American lines. We also had more miles of track than anyone else. Our rail system played a big part in making this country an industrial colossus.
Where's your source for this claim that it's been kicked off the Peninsula? Yeah, there's been flack from some communities about elevated tracks, but kicking it off the Peninsula would make the project practically useless, since that would destroy any travel benefits to all those people (like me) who live between San Francisco and San Jose.
Besides that, I figure they'll have to elevate or bury the lines eventually anyway, because too many trains are being delayed by people who use them as a suicide mechanism.
125 mph sounds exaggerated, since regular running above that speed with steam traction would have challenged or broken Mallard's record. But the basic point is valid--the fastest U.S. passenger trains in their heyday were much faster than they are today. The railroads were highly competitive, and passenger and mail service was important to them, so they did all they could to move it fast. It was the growth of air and highway transport which made those services no longer economical. Today's Amtrak trains are slow because they are usually the lowest priority traffic; the way the system works now, they mostly run on tracks owned by freight railroads and are nothing but an inconvenience to them.
However, rail travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles has never been especially fast. The main line runs through the Coast Ranges, a twisty route with lots of grades, so the sort of speeds possible in the flat Midwest were out of the question here.
...thanks to one abbreviation too many. It talks about "A. ramidus" (Ardipithecus ramidus) and then immediately jumps to mentioning "A. afarensis". If you didn't already know what "A. afarensis" was, you might assume that it's another species within genus Ardipithecus, but that second "A." stands for a separate genus, Australopithecus.
To me it sounds like you're asking "could you make a computer starting with 1940s technology?", but that's pretty much what actually happened, since the first computers were developed during the 1940s. So just look into how the early computers were built.
For fundamental logic technology, I think the two main approaches were electromechanical relays, used by Howard Aiken at Harvard and Konrad Zuse in Germany, and vacuum tube triodes (or thermionic valves as the British called them), used by Eckert and Mauchly with ENIAC. Vacuum tubes won out for about the next decade, until transistors had matured enough to replace them.
For memory, different techniques were used. Machine registers were usually built using flip-flops made from the same technology as the other logic circuits. Programming was often done by plugboard wiring or by punched cards on the earliest machines, which didn't use the stored-program concept. (This approach is sometimes called a "Harvard architecture" and was named for Aiken's machines at Harvard.) Later machines did use denser memory technologies like the ones you mentioned: delay lines, cathode ray tubes, or spinning magnetic drums. These weren't randomly addressable and did have long access times, but that was just something designers had to work with. Even though cathode ray tube memories weren't randomly addressable, they did share some traits with modern DRAMs, like destructive read-out and the need for constant refreshing.
Secondary storage was on punched cards or magnetic tape; magnetic disks were still in the future.
It seems that some systems did use neons for some logic and memory (see here, here, and here), but they're kind of tricky and are slow to switch, which may be why they weren't used more widely.
Indeed, for the Cray and Control Data supercomputers they have, there's no way you could hope to get a working machine. Those systems belonged to national defense labs, and when they were discarded, federal law required them to be disabled thoroughly enough to make it impractical to get them working again. Of course, I imagine that a group of dedicated people with enough time and resources could resurrect one, but it would be a huge task. Not to mention that the running and maintenance costs would be very high, worse than when the system was new. The Computer History Museum doesn't have the resources for that, and their focus is on preservation and documentation, not on reviving dead machines.
To me it seems more practical to revive these systems through accurate simulation on modern hardware.
He's thinking of the old Computer Museum in Boston. Actually, the Computer History Museum was created by people who were dissatisfied with the Computer Museum, after its focus had shifted from computer history to public education about computers. But since there's less of a compelling reason for that latter role to be filled by a museum, it's no surprise to me that the Boston museum went under.
For the time in years he's really free! While you sit at home [... doing blah blah blah ...], he's going to go out, get drunk, and finally get some real pussy.
I rather doubt his wife would be too happy with that.
As a couple of other people have pointed out, these are cyanobacteria, not "algae". Except for being microscopic and having photosynthesis, cyanobacteria are a long way from algae, although they used to be called "blue-green algae" before biologists figured out what they really were. They're actually a type of bacteria and are a very ancient group, possibly as old as 3 billion years or more. They are single-celled prokaryotes with a very simple cell structure which has no nucleus and lacks significant organelles. Algae, on the other hand, are eukaryotes, which evolved much later; they have a much more complex cell with both a nucleus and organelles. Among these organelles are chloroplasts, which do the actual photosynthesis in algae cells, and in fact these chloroplasts may be descended from cyanobacteria which became internal symbionts within eukaryotic cells.
Where I live, sometimes the clouds from the mountain waves are visible in long rows at over 25,000 feet elevation, in lines for a hundred miles downwind of the mountains themselves, and every one of those is strong enough to shake a plane like a ragdoll. A B-52 bomber had its vertical tail ripped off and lost part of a wing in clear air turbulence 5000 feet above the nearest mountain.
As another example of the danger of clear air turbulence from mountain waves, on March 5, 1966, BOAC Flight 911, a Boeing 707 on a flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong, broke up as it was flying near Mt. Fuji in clear weather, possibly in order to give the passengers a good view of the mountain.
Yup, same incident. Also mentioned in this WSJ article.
From the parent post:
Actually, you're both around 80 years too late, thanks to the "iron lung". In fact, one iron lung inventor did sue another for patent infringement during the 1930s. However, he ended up with his own patents being invalidated, since it turned out all the claims in those patents had already been covered by earlier patents from others.